The signs that civic society in this country is disintegrating grow more apparent by the week. In a year which has witnessed the arrival in earnest of a shoplifting epidemic, the continued normalisation of fare-dodging on London’s train and tube network, and a surge in fuel theft at garage forecourts, it now transpires that drivers are increasingly ignoring traffic lights.
According to a report in the Sunday Times, between 2022 and the end of last year, there was a 61 per cent increase in the number of drivers caught going through red lights. Across the 29 police forces that supplied figures to a freedom of information request, this figure rose from over 85,000 to more than 137,000. As with shoplifting, the problem is likely to be worse than figures suggest, because many police forces did not provide data and less than 2 per cent of this country’s traffic lights are monitored by cameras able to issue penalties.
People are asking themselves: why should I be the only mug doing the right thing?
Road users flouting red lights have long been a problem when it comes to cyclists. Many of their numbers have for decades behaved this way in the knowledge that they will mostly go unchallenged, let alone be prosecuted. So it’s hardly surprising that drivers are following suite. Why, they are now asking themselves, should they do the right thing if their fellow road-users refuse to obey the rules?
That trend is alarming because it’s contagious. It’s the same one which has been replicated at supermarkets by ostensibly respectable middle-class types, who now see nothing wrong with the odd bit of pilfering, seeing that everyone else is also doing it. It’s been repeated on public transport, where there is now less stigma or dread attached to not paying for your ticket, by those who, in a different age, would feel ashamed of themselves for such behaviour or fear punishment for it.
The more this trend spreads throughout society, the more it snowballs. Drivers might well have taken their cue from cyclists who have acted with disregard for the law or their fellow citizens, but these motorists will also have seen what’s been happening at their local garage, supermarket or railway station. Once people see rules broken in one area of life, they have less compunction to break it themselves in another.
It’s not only the fear of the ultimate consequences that should deter law-breakers in a functioning society, but also the fear of getting caught in the first place, combined with its actual likelihood. But a new batch of motorists are not scared because they correctly perceive that their chances of any repercussions have lessened. Of the figure of 137,585 drivers who were actually collared for failing to comply with traffic light signals last year, less than a fifth – 24,955 – received a conviction. As it stands, similar to shoplifting and petty theft in general, many drivers neither fear getting caught nor what happens if they do.
The collapse in respect for the law on the railways was highlighted in a film which went viral last week, showing five fare dodgers pushing through the barriers at Romford station in east London within two minutes. As the man responsible for the footage, David Taylor, a councillor for the London Borough of Havering, said:
Like a pound-shop Bobby Jenrick, I filmed ticket gate jumpers whilst waiting at Romford station for a friend. Everyone obvious as anything and not bothering to hide their faces.
That all-too-familiar ugly bravado, underlined last year by Robert Jenrick, then a Conservative MP, when he challenged fare-dodgers on the Tube, continues to spread because society has let it do so. While police, station staff and security guards seem increasingly less willing or able to enforce the law or apprehend wrongdoers, members of the public are likewise reluctant to intervene for fear of adverse consequences for themselves. A series of recent stories about supermarket staff getting sacked for confronting thieves has only intensified a feeling of lawlessness that is enveloping this country. This feeling that results in a general apathetic drift into libertinage. People are more frequently asking themselves: why should I be the only mug doing the right thing?
The social contract emerges and is maintained by two means. One is through custom and the other is through force. In various sliding proportions, societies rely on moral codes which are obeyed by its members for fear of breaking a taboo and losing face, and they rely on laws, which carry the threat of punishment for transgressors.
We can no longer realistically seek to make amends through the first avenue, because a nihilist and multicultural society such as ours has shed its taboos and has no shared, unifying sense of community. The only option left is to increase and enforce punishment and increase the fear and likelihood of it happening.
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